Northgate High School ensures uninterrupted access to its IT resources by building a fault-tolerant storage system around StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Northgate High School faced significant limitations with its legacy IT infrastructure, relying on aging physical SAN servers spread across multiple locations on campus. These systems had reached end-of-life, were no longer supported, and incurred high replacement costs beyond the school’s budget. Although the SAN setup was configured as active-active for high availability (HA), it failed to provide true fault tolerance. A single server room outage would disrupt the entire network. The partial use of flash storage didn’t translate into performance gains under Microsoft Hyper-V, further diminishing value.

The school needed a cost-effective and reliable storage solution that would meet its operational needs.

Thanks to StarWind VSAN, we have an active-active, high-availability SAN server solution. It has been flawless for us. I would highly recommend this solution.

Stefan Novak, Principal of ICT Infrastructure and Service

SOLUTION

Northgate High School turned to StarWind VSAN after a flawless trial period that demonstrated its reliability and performance. The school deployed StarWind VSAN on cost-effective hardware, setting up two virtual SAN servers in an active-active configuration. This setup not only achieved the desired HA but also ensured zero downtime – even when one node experienced a processor failure. The load seamlessly shifted to the second server, with no impact on end users. After a quick replacement and resynchronization, the system was fully operational again.

The school saved £30,000 over three years and now enjoys a stable, resilient infrastructure tailored to its Hyper-V environment.